Warfare
After Civil War, I didn’t expect much from Alex Garland.
I really didn’t like that film — probably my least favorite thing he’s ever done. So when I sat down for Warfare, I was hesitant, waiting for the same half-baked "art house" take on brutality and the human condition. I figured it would be more of the same: pop nihilism disguised as depth.
I was wrong.
Warfare is leagues better. It’s staggering, really — how someone can make something as deluded and silly as Civil War one minute, and then deliver one of the most powerful war films I’ve ever seen the next.
There’s no fat on Warfare. You’re thrown straight into it — no slow ramp-up, no hand-holding. You live in the bloodied, battered memories of these soldiers for just long enough to feel it in your bones — and then it ends. Garland and Ray Mendoza’s goal here isn’t to explain anything. It’s to immerse you, disorient you, and leave you alone with what you saw. No speeches. No tidy conclusions. Just war, remembered like a fever dream.
The sound design alone should come with a warning. It doesn’t just capture the chaos; it becomes it. Where Saving Private Ryan tried to show you the horror of Omaha Beach, Warfare grabs you by the throat and drags you through it — no room for Spielbergian sentimentality here. It’s ruthless. It’s overwhelming. It’s alive.
And while I worried this would be another piece of glorified propaganda — a hollow, chest-thumping dramatization of American soldiers — it’s not. Warfare lets you step, however briefly, into the shoes of the Iraqis too: the freedom fighters, the civilians. It doesn’t take an anti-American stance, and it doesn’t glorify anyone either. That’s not the point. Warfare is about memory — the memories of men haunted by a conflict they didn’t fully understand.
It honors those who lived it without scrubbing away the mess and ugliness of what they were part of. The last shot is devastating — the camera taking the place of the Iraqi fighters and civilians, forcing you to sit with the aftermath. The story doesn’t end when the bullets stop.
If there’s any justice, Warfare will change the way we write and produce war films.
Here’s to hoping.